I met Randy a few years back on a studio tour and always enjoyed their approach to thinking about learning, collaboration and excellence. The video is part of the stories and insights made available by George Lucas' EduTopia on iTunes. So, as I start a new career at a new company with new people in a new area of the marketplace for me, I look to inspirations like Randy in how to think about making a difference.

Here is an example of customer innovation at the Victoria Department of Education in Australia, a country always at the forefront of technology and educating it's citizens across it's wide territories and now building an "Ultranet" with the Oracle Student Learning system. 

The big change taking place in online learning for kids is thinking about and directing "personalized" learning services which are customized to each individual student. Oracle is making a strategic move from their enormous success in the back-office administration and into the front office in K-20 edu markets around the world. The key application for that initiative and my new charter is Oracle Student Learning (OSL). Stay tuned for more news soon and if your campus has an interest in OSL, be sure to let me know so we can start moving schools from industrial production lines to dynamic customized online learning places for kids, teachers, parents and administrators.

I just got my registration back from the Virtual Worlds - Best Practices in Education conference set for March 12-13th. We'll have some good use cases profiled with our friends at Saint Paul and Essex and an update on the new version0.5 Preview Release of Project Wonderland. See you in-world.

This is one announcement I hope to change. This is one I would not.

As a follow-up to yesterday's post on the amazing virtual 3D camera magic behind avatar, it's cool to see WETA using MySQL too. The processing power required to render these new ultra-realistic digital worlds includes 40,000 processors, 104 terabytes of RAM, 17GB/minute of storage for the final cut making WETA's renderfarm #196-199 on the Top 500. As John Lasseter always says, "the art challenges the technology and technology inspires the art". I cannot wait to see the worlds our students will create in an inter-connected network of 3-D Wonderland servers and hope it's powered by Oracle-Sun systems.

I saw Avatar in IMAX 3-D last Friday. It is simply an amazing cinematic experience and great to see 3-D now hitting the big screen, TV screens and of course the web. Here's a cool video about some of the technology behind the scenes in case you missed it. Hats off to Mr. Cameron and his crew.

Michael posted a new video this morning of the progress with the language learning project called SiMiLLE taking place at Essex University and in Wonderland

The folks at Birmingham City University are moving along well in building their new communication and training models for healthcare professionals using Project Wonderland. The photo below shows some of the fine modeling work, most of the apps they need running in-world and even new Evolver avatars!

Here's some info on the latest Wonderland effort as part of European FP7 initiative. Dr. Michael Gardner at Essex who headed up the MiRTLE Project with us is the PI now on + Spaces.

Recently funded by the EU Framework 7 ICT programme (call 4), the +Spaces project (Positive Spaces: Policy Simulation in Virtual Spaces) will start in January 2010. The value of the award to the University of Essex is 316,000 EURO over 30 months, and the project involves partners from IBM, Fraunhofer, ATOS Origin, University Leuven, Athens Technology Centre, University of Athens, and the Hellenic Parliament. The PI at the University of Essex is Michael Gardner. This project will be building on the well established work in developing virtual world and mixed-reality applications using the open-source Project Wonderland toolset from Sun microsystems. +Spaces aims to provide novel technologies and instruments that will allow government bodies to measure public opinion on a large scale and maximise the outcomes of prospective policy measures by leveraging the power of online communities. From the +Spaces perspective, virtual worlds form a vast reserve of group knowledge that, once aggregated and properly processed, can be incorporated in the policy making process

This is a first look at use of the Glasshouse plugin API, with a plugin that allows ad-hoc query building via the 3D environment! Multiple datasets can be correlated and compared. Here CEO Ben Lindquist shows some analysis of firewall log activity to and from China

Here's the latest video from the Sun Center-of-Excellence for Project Wonderland at Saint Paul College. You can learn all about their development, curriculum and technology initatives at the Virtual Northstar Project site.

PEOPLE2PEOPLE - Using Virtual Worlds for developing Leadership and Conflict Resolution Skills Among Arab and Jewish Israeli Students. Announcing the Opening the Immersive Education Middle East Virtual World Project supported by the Grid Institute on Sun Microsystem's Project Wonderland platform.

Join this morning's Sun in Education Webcast series live at 10am pacific featuring a discussion and overview of the rich media initiative work done with Georgetown University, Sharestream and Sun.

Please welcome our latest member addition to the Wonderland business community, Amphisocial. Whether it's bringing Google apps into Wonderland, virtual project meetings or creating role-playing games for educators, Anu and team are the latest innovators now experimenting and building in v0.5